One class of cooking utensils includes a vessel for holding food that is to be cooked or otherwise prepared and an extended handle that is connected to the vessel and allows the cook to manipulate the vessel. In this class of cooking utensils are skillets, fry pans, woks, grill pans, chef's pans, sauciers, deep fryers and sauté pans to name a few. Many of the larger cooking utensils in this class that are capable or holding a significant amount of food and/or have a large diameter vessel have a second handle that is disposed opposite to the extended handle. The extended handle and the second handle facilitate the movement of the utensil from one place to another by the cook. Hereinafter the term cooking utensil or utensil is used to refer to cooking utensils of the noted class.
In many households, storage space in the kitchen is limited. Consequently, to save space, cooking utensils are stacked one on top of the other in a cabinet, in a drawer, or on a shelf. Typically, the utensils are stacked in a nested fashion with the utensil having the largest diameter vessel located at the bottom of the stack, the smallest diameter vessel located at the top of the stack, and utensils with intermediate diameters located between the utensils at the top and bottom of the stack. Stacking the utensils in this way can make the retrieval of a particular utensil awkward and cumbersome. To alleviate this problem, various types of storage racks for such cooking utensils have evolved. For example, there is a storage rack that is typically attached to a ceiling and has a plurality of hooks from which the cooking utensils can be hung. Typically, the hook is passed through a hole in the end of the extended handle or a loop of wire associated with the extended handle. There are also vertical storage racks that hold the utensils in a vertical stack but separated from one another so that the cook does not have “de-nest” the utensils from one another to retrieve the desired utensil. Additionally, there are storage racks that hold utensils in a horizontal “stack,” similar to files in a file cabinet.